What Financial Meltdowns Teach Us About The Global Warming Scam

When I describe the weird world of climate science to people who are strangers to that world I know it sounds fantastical. But there are strong parallels with the recently destroyed economies of Iceland, Greece, and Ireland.

By any rational standard, the climate science world is surreal. People who behave outrageously still get taken seriously. It’s as though everyone has decided not to notice. It’s as though we’re part of an alternate reality where the normal rules don’t apply.

In a sensible world, scientists who refuse to share the data and computer codes behind iconic climate graphs and important conclusions would be ostracized by the scientific community. Instead, they get showered with awards and accolades (see the bottom of this post for more detail).

In a sane universe, the fact that two-thirds of the chapters in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report were written by scientists known to be affiliated with the World Wildlife Fund lobby group would damage the IPCC’s reputation beyond repair. Instead, we collectively pretend it doesn’t matter.

When I describe the weird world of climate science to people who are strangers to that world I know it sounds fantastical. Yeah, right I imagine them thinking behind their polite smiles. Surely it can’t be that bad. Surely there’s a reasonable explanation.

I experienced a shock of recognition while reading those case studies. People were doing bizarre things that they – and all of those around them – should have known would lead to tears. Yet almost everyone bought in. Normal rules were jettisoned. Ordinary morality was abandoned. Disbelief was suspended. The few souls who tried to sound the alarm were ignored, ridiculed, demoted, or fired.

In other words, the behaviour I’ve spent the past three years writing about isn’t unique to climate science. The same pattern is horrifyingly evident elsewhere. It’s as though our IQs have all dropped sharply in recent years. It’s as though we have no standards anymore.

Allow me to explain:

Iceland is home to 300,000 people. In five years those people went from being a nation of sensible fishermen to imagining they were the new princes of high finance. Writes Lewis:

[A] hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.

That’s the bare-bones version of what happened. Suddenly Icelandic banks no one had ever heard of were buying century-old British banks, not to mention sports teams and airlines. Although it was all a mass delusion, it carried on for years.

When everyone finally came to their senses the banking sector losses alone amounted to $330,000 for every man, woman, and child in Iceland. And that’s not counting the personal debt associated with mortgages that far exceed the current value of the property to which they are associated – as well as the fact that the Icelandic stock market all but collapsed.

Lewis quotes someone from the International Monetary Fund saying:

It was just a group of young kids. In this egalitarian society, they came in, dressed in black, and started doing business.

Here’s another quote, from a British banker testifying before a House of Commons committee:

They ran their business in a very strange way. Everyone there was incredibly young…And they had no idea what they were doing.

When a Danish bank wrote a report concluding that something was amiss in the Icelandic banking sector the reaction was eerily similar to what we see in climate science. The messenger was accused of having suspect motives and the message was summarily dismissed.

When an economics professor from Chicago gave a speech five months before Iceland’s economy crashed in October 2008 (in which he declared that their banks were already dead and that the economy had no more than nine months) Lewis reports that Iceland bankers in the audience “sought to prevent newspapers from reporting the speech.”

In other words, a gang of Icelandic kids trashed their nation’s economy. And rather than stopping them, the grownups went along for the ride. The checks-and-balances we would all expect to have been in place, the safeguards we would imagine going hand-in-hand with financial transactions of that magnitude, were entirely absent.

Does this make rational sense? No. Does it sound plausible? Not really. But it happened. And the people of Iceland are going to be living with the consequences for a long, long, long time.

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